Most girls have a fantasy at one time or another of owning their very own horsey. Kit Daniels is one of those lucky girls who made the fantasy a reality. She named her quarter horse mare “Lucky” but as you can see, Lucky may not be so lucky after all unless she can put some distance between her and that hungry Tyrannosaurus. Such is life in the Yellowstone High Country now that dinosaurs have made it their home again. Click the image for a closer — and scarier — look.
The image is an outtake from the cover art for the first book in my Dinosaur Wars series. I’m rather proud of the fact that the rex is bristling with hackle feathers. You see, at the time I painted the image back in 2004, scientists were doubtful that T rex had anything but scales all over him. Nowadays they’ve found fossils that prove there were feathers in the dinosaurian line that rex belonged to, and so were likely on rex as well. I guess I was a bit ahead of my time on that one. I’ve uploaded a high resolution version to the major art website, DeviantArt, so go there if you’d like to frame a nice “girl on horseback” print for your wall.
Another item: in order to make it easier to get a copy of Dinosaur Wars: Earthfall while the ebook version is still available for free, I’ve established a “Landing Page” as they say in the online book trade. That’s a place where anyone searching for my story can find it and then just click once to get the book on their favorite ebook-seller’s web site. If you haven’t got a copy yet, you might just want to click on through to the Landing Page right now to download your own freebie while supplies last.
I have another question regarding Dinosaur Wars. How did the Kra come about? I mean, how did you come up with the idea?
At first, I knew I wanted to write about people coming in contact with dinosaurs like T rex and pachyrhinosaurus. Then, as I thought about how other writers had done it, I got the idea that the dinosaurs cloned themselves, as opposed to the Jurassic Park concept where we humans cloned them. From there, I developed the idea that there was just one intelligent species 65 million years ago, as is true today. I researched other author’s ideas about intelligent dinosaurs and decided a species very similar to raptors would be the most likely to have developed intelligence. And that led to the Kra.